The interview process started with a take-home test, which had to be completed within 48 hours. After passing that stage, the next step was a 3-hour onsite interview. For someone currently working full-time, I found it difficult to justify travelling to the office and spending 3 hours during the working day for a role I may not get. Thought Machine did not seem willing to compromise on this, which was disappointing. That said, the recruiter was very understanding, flexible, and gave me plenty of time and freedom when arranging the process. Overall, it was a positive experience, and I really like the company’s vision. However, the time commitment made it hard to continue, especially as I am currently leading a project in my current role, so I decided to withdraw from the process. Good luck to others who are able to make the time for the onsite interview.

Three rounds, one chat with recruiter, 48 hour take home exercise to make a calendar front end, three stage final interview. 1 systems design bike booking app, 1 algo question which is related to maximum size of a subset such that there are only k different chars, 1 front end interview which asks to expand the code you wrote in the take home. The final interview, the laptop they handed me couldn’t even accept input data in the chrome web console to test different calendar environments, and we were only able to test a scenario because I’d made a custom input for to accept events in the UI, outside of the console. Extremely disorganised and pretty stressful to write code in someone elses laptop and IDE, which you were unable to npm run for firewall reasons. This overall doesn’t seem like a great company. When I asked what learning and development opportunities there are at TM, one senior engineer I’d work closely with just said “I’m tired, I’m old” and passed it over to his more junior colleague who came across very arrogant and didn’t actually explain learning opportunities there are, just “oh we have talks every so often”. Seems also like they have maxed out their market share currently. Overall not impressed and got very poor vibes. To top it off, they ghosted me after the final interview. No response after two weeks despite following up twice, once after 7 days, one after 10 days. So poor from what is meant to be one of the “top employers” in the UK. No doubt smart people but not somewhere I’d imagine they foster collaboration or are nice people to work with. Can’t say the interviewers made me in any way excited for the role even if I was to receive an offer